


are you the now or never kind? (he wishes it were never)

by argle_fraster



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Author is a pretentious fuck, F/M, Inspired by Real Events, One-Sided Relationship, Pretentious, Stream of Consciousness, except for working through real life things, there is nothing redeeming about this, what even is this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 23:05:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because there's a lot there, buried in growling flesh and the pale moonlight that streaks the black grass with blue, and when did his life become this tangled <i>thing</i> that he can't find the thread to?</p>
            </blockquote>





	are you the now or never kind? (he wishes it were never)

Maybe she slept with him out of pity, but he thought they were friends, the kind of friends that text each other to keep sane, that call in the middle of the night to deal with the aftershocks and nightmares - canines and sinewy muscles, everything coated with red, and pain, pain, pain, the sort that makes you scream so harsh your throat closes off. He doesn't think it was pity, but he doesn't really think it was romantic feelings either, and he isn't sure what lies in-between, undecipherable and convoluted with everything their lives have become. (Because there's a lot there, buried in growling flesh and the pale moonlight that streaks the black grass with blue, and when did his life become this tangled _thing_ that he can't find the thread to?)

The thing is, it's hard to watch her now, because when they are bent over Peter's laptop trying to figure out which way is up (and he's lost that ability, after everything, like he's down the rabbit hole completely and he's drank the potion, only nothing is righting itself like it's supposed to, it's all just swirling further down the drain) because Stiles knows now what her hair smells like and the way she bites her lip when there are fingertips trailing down her abdomen. He watches her as she bends over her notes, scratching theories with a dulled pencil tip, and he thinks about ginger hair strewn over his pillow and tries to focus somewhere else, and wouldn't you know, the one time he _needs_ his attention to flit and flicker and swing, it stays firmly in one place like a drowning man tied to a sinking anchor.

His anchor, the wolves' anchor, and fuck, when did everything become about anchors? (When Beacon Hills became the lighthouse and the captain all in one, the first mate that won't let them leave and the ship that's swaying beneath their feet, overturned and rocked by the waves they weren't anticipating because they weren't watching the horizon.) She's his, always has been, always will be, and now that she's chewing on the end of her pencil with white teeth, the gloss is leaving a pink residue on the eraser that's going to be sticky and smell faintly of strawberries.

"This part isn't true," she says, and just like that, with that air of finality, she draws a strike through the whole sentence she'd copied from the laptop screen onto her page. (A straight line, too, like the kind that rips open hearts and leaves them in pieces in her wake.) "The translation isn't right, and Peter probably just put it here to screw with anyone who ended up finding his files after he was gone."

He wants to shake her, to yell at her, to ask her why, why, why did you give me a taste of the future you never meant for me to have? There are a thousand unanswered questions and they'll never get voiced, because his throat swells and chokes and he's got nothing, bobbing at sea just trying not to get crushed by the white caps she leaves on the shore. (He's got to get over this ocean analogy, there has to be a better one, but it's the waves in her hair that make him want to swim through them and let everything crash over his head.)

"Yeah," he replies, and it's everything he doesn't want it to be.

Her gaze is sharp - like iron, like _steel_ , like copper except that's not a particularly good metaphor for the flint in her eyes, it's just that the color matches - when she raises her head. "Are you sick or something?" she asks, demands, just like she demands everything else that people are helpless to resist giving. "You've hardly made a dent in your files. Keep up; I can't be pulling all the weight here."

There are textbooks and crappy alt rock band posters and first edition comic books, shoved back behind a few three-ring binders, and he probably should have collected the dirty laundry that's littering the carpet, and Lydia Martin, with her notebook balanced in her lap, and Stiles' life is never going to be as rose-colored as it once was. He wishes she hadn't done it, let him do it, done it _with_ him, because it takes two to pedal down the street without falling in the ditch, and now he knows, all the way to his bones, deep down in his gut, what he's never going to have again, and it's so much worse than imagining the feeling as he drifts off to sleep.

(I'm sick, I'm sick, he wants to say, sick because I can't fucking _sleep_ after knowing what it felt like to hear your breathing on the other side of the bed, on the pillow that it took days to wash because of the lingering traces of perfume that had embedded themselves within the linen.)

Fuck all.

"Sorry," he says instead. "Preoccupied with imminent death, I suppose, as always."

"Well, occupy yourself with staving it off, then, because it's far more useful."

It is, he supposes, because waking up to see another sunrise is something that's always penciled into his day planner on principle, but he'll be hard-pressed to figure out any other comparison to make with the vivid orange and red hues of the dawn that doesn't come back to the tendrils of her hair that are tied up in a blue ribbon.


End file.
